Advertisement:

In Real Life, sheep generally do not spontaneously combust, and if they did it would probably be a serious matter. This does not stop video games and other media from featuring exploding sheep for absurd comedy, because there's just something inherently silly about the idea having those placid woolly ruminants explode with a loud cry of "baa!". It's so prevalent that The Other Wiki used to have an article about it. Of course, different species, barnyard or otherwise, have been shown to explode as well, but for some reason, writers and designers just like their exploding sheep.

Advertisement:

Examples:

Bad Taste by Peter Jackson features a gratuitous exploding sheep near the end. But given this was back in Jackson's gore and splatter fest days, you could just see it coming. Also things tend to explode when hit by an RPG.

The Star Wars prequels have a large-rumped animal called a "shaak" that is described by the production crew as the Naboo equivalent of a sheep. There are easter eggs of exploding shaaks in several action sequences.

British movie The Baker has a young boy who enjoys making explosives in his free time. He causes several sheep to explode with his homemade bombs; indeed, the first one to do that has its head propelled straight into the protagonist's, knocking him cold and starting the chain of events that makes up the plot.

In Godmonster Of Indian Flats the titular monster is a mutated sheep which grows larger throughout the movie, until it explodes in the climactic scene.

The New Zealand film Black Sheep (2007) ends with the protagonists blowing up the infected sheep as they realize that sheep flatulence has created a potentially explosive situation.

The 1999 science fiction Before and After by Matthew Thomas has exploding sheep as one of the signs of the imminent apocalypse. As the blurb on the back puts it, "This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a BAA-OOM!"

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway has a digression on the unfortunate interaction between sheep and minefields. The word "ovicide" is repeatedly used.

James Herriot references an incident in the life of another vet where a cow exploded. Apparently due to a build-up of trapped internal gas and a careless cigarette. This may be an Urban Legend in the veterinary profession.

A Practical Guide To Evil has its main character Catherine raising cows and deers from the dead, then filling them with goblin munitions and sending them to explode near the enemy's defences.

Advertisement:

Live Action TV

On an episode of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, his character, the psychic Carnac the Magnificent, predicts "Sis boom bah!" as the answer to a card sealed in an envelope (one of his signature tricks). As seen above, the card refers to "the sound made when a sheep explodes". The resulting riotous laughter from Carson, his co-host Ed McMahon, and the audience, literally stopped the show cold for several minutes.

Monty Python's Flying Circus featured exploding animals, including sheep, in a few sketches. One sketch (and subsequent running gag) featured exploding kamikaze Scotsmen.

Owen on The Vicar of Dibley once said he was late for the episode's parish council meeting because, and I quote, "Sheep exploded."

Threatened but averted in The Andy Griffith Show when a goat who has eaten a load of dynamite shows up at the jail.

If you click one time too many on sheep (or other non-hostile critters) in Warcraft games, they explode. The third game even had a mini-game where you had to dodge exploding sheep running at you.

Clicking makes critters explode in StarCraft as well, but no space sheep.

The ice setting has something that looks like a tauntaun, though. Close enough.

In World of Warcraft, people with engineering profession can make explosive mechanical sheep. Also, in the Undercity's Apothecarium, there is an underground section where with an area where people are held in cages, meant to be used as experiments of undeath. There is an Undead NPC who tests a "viscous fluid" upon one particular human male, which turns him into a rabbit, then a squirrel, and finally a sheep. Then, the NPC pokes the sheep repeatedly, and the sheep explodes.

Hearth Stone has a card called "Explosive Sheep" that does damage to everyone when it dies.

Worms has these, as well as exploding cows... and exploding grannies... and pigeons... bananas... donkeys... and that's only some of the ludicrous weaponry that explode by default, before you start using the editors.

During one mission of Armed and Dangerous, a drunken explosives expert trying to defuse a bomb attached to a kidnapped prize sheep accidentally sets it off.

In a video game titled, appropriately, Sheep, many of the hazards will cause the sheep to explode.

In Sim Golf, turn the balls into exploding sheep by pressing CTRL and S and letting go, then typing BOMBSHEEP.

Gem Fighter Online has a cash-bought exocore transformation (dubbed "Sheep's Cry" in the US release) features an explosion technique. The explosion is a translucent red version of the sheep's outer image expanded out around the character. While it causes damage and knockback to enemies, the sheep itself is unaffected by it.

In Revenge of the Mutant Camels, one stage (called "Through Pastures Blue...") features sheep that spontaneously and gratuitously explode into lethal chunks of wool.

Web artist Fredrik K. T. Andersson (Not Safe for Work) had a great comic of his character Baalah (an apparent nudist and bisexual 'demon princess' complete with horns, tail, and red skin) launching sheep as fireworks by inserting chemicals into their bodily orifices.

Livestock, including sheep, have been used as an expedient and ad-hoc way to clear minefields.

Inadvertently so in the Falklands Islands. British military engineers charged with making safe after the war were less than enchanted that their Argentinian counterparts, in defiance of accepted Health and Safety practice, had set up minefields in a haphazard random way and had not kept any sort of record as to where and how many mines they'd used. To this day sheep still go "bang" in parts of East Falkland.

Comedian Spike Milligan served on the expected invasion coast of Southern England in 1940. He relates how some people would still insist on taking their dogs for a walk on the beach as if it were still peacetime, and felt seriously inconvenienced that they were no longer allowed to, for the very good reason that the beaches were now heavily mined. He relates an incident of a distraught woman who let her dog off the lead in the wrong place. Because she had clout with the military authorities, Milligan's unit was tasked with the chore of retrieving the dog. Milligan did feel they could have handled it more tactfully; the owner was eventually shown a severed canine leg and a collar and asked "Is this your dog, ma'am?"

Dismantling Britain's beach defences after WW2 took decades. It wasn't until the late 1950's that many southern and eastern English beaches were deemed free of landmines and safe for holidaymakers. Even today things still surface; a north Norfolk beach had to be evacuated in 1998 after a dog triggered an hitherto overlooked mine.

There's a tabletop game based on this practice called "Unexploded Cow". The goal of the game is basically to make its title a lie.

Not sheep, but toads have been known to explode after emitting an unearthly screech. The cause? Crows that have figured out how to rip out the toad's delicious liver in one quick movement. The toad, alive but hurt and understandably terrified, responds to the threat in the normal way, by inflating itself. Only it's got a hole in it now, so the viscera go flying.

Truth in Television and the reason behind a large number of cattle mutilations (sorry, those who believe in UFO's and cryptids.) When any large animal dies, the gases released during decomposition build up in the animals abdominal cavity, causing the animal to bloat up and eventually rupture.

Equally as bad for dead whales, which are massive. There was one case of a small town being covered in whale guts and blubber because the gases inside the body built up pressure, causing it to explode while people were moving the body through town.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy